SMC students express e-mail worries
By NELLIE WILLIAMS
News Writer
Before heading off to class on Wednesday morning, Saint Mary's College junior Kelly Rizzi checks her e-mail for any important messages. Her inbox comes up and indicates that she has 20 new messages. Surprised, she scans down the screen and sees that they are all from Saint Mary's students. She opens the first one and reads it.
"Two GA's for sale."
The next one she opens is from someone looking for one GA. Frustrated she deletes the rest of the e-mails that indicate they are from someone at Saint Mary's.
"I must get at least 10 mass e-mails a day," Rizzi said. "More during a football week because everyone is looking for tickets or trying to sell them."
Mass e-mailing has become a computer bug, catching almost everyone on Saint Mary's campus. A student only needs to type in each class name and they are able to send a message to every student who uses the college e-mail. Although mass e-mailing is often used to inform the student body of current events happening on campus, it has been abused lately with students trying to buy/sell football tickets, looking for rides home or who have lost an item.
Just when she thought the mass e-mailing would settle down because football season was almost over and no one would be trying to sell tickets anymore, junior Anne Bill is still receiving many.
"Someone tried to sell a ticket for a basketball game," said Bill. "I thought, `Oh gosh, not this again now.'"
"I once received a mass e-mail from a girl who had lost her toe-nail clippers in the bathroom and was wondering if anyone found them," said Rizzi.
Only a few hours after receiving that e-mail, Rizzi had 20 more new e-mails with the same subject of toenail clippers.
"People were complaining about that one e-mail and then someone else would complain about the next one. It just doesn't stop. It's like a chain reaction."
The mass e-mailing caught on last fall when someone discovered all that was needed to reach the whole campus was to type in the class name and then add @saintamrys.edu.
"It's always been that everyone has had access to e-mailing the student body, just nobody knew about it before one class started it," said student body president Michelle Nagle. "Then class governments started to pick it up too."
Once discovered, however, no one forgot about it.
"[We] recognized it as a problem we needed to look into and decide what to do about the misuse and abuse of it," said Nagle.
Board of Governance began discussing the problem of mass e-mails toward the end of last April during its annual retreat. Elizabeth Cusick, Informational Technology commissioner for BOG., then put together a proposal on how to maintain the mass e-mails, without loosing the importance of its use for educational purposes.
"It was an issue BOG thought in general we needed to address," Cusick said.
Many students have become increasingly frustrated with the mass e-mails. BOG sent out an e-mail earlier in the fall asking students to stop abusing the e-mail class lists. When the e-mail numbers continued to peak each week as a football game approached, BOG decided it was time to step up with a policy.
"We sent the policy to students and asked for feedback about a month ago," said Nagle.
This past Monday, BOG discussed student reactions they received and unanimously decided to submit the policy to the Dr.Linda Timm and the student affairs committee.
"Most of the feedback we received was asking us to please do something about the problem," said Nagle. "Students are very, very frustrated."
Under the e-mail proposal, each student will still be subscribed to her class list without the option of being able to unsubscribe, but the information sent out to the list will be limited and filtered through each corresponding class board. If a student wishes to send an e-mail to a list, she would first have to e-mail it to the board. The board will then decide if the e-mail meets the guidelines depending on the information it includes.
The College president, vice president of student affairs, Information Technology, dean of faculty, registrar's office, and the five major boards of government, will also have access to the class e-mails.
Students may also subscribe to as many list-serves as they wish to receive additional information of what might interest them.
Campus activities, athletics, arts and current events will all fall under list-serves. A student may unsubscribe from a list-serve at any time.
A concern that came up as BOG proposed the policy was freedom of speech. However, now students are more concerned with how they are going to communicate on campus now.
"Not so many people are concerned that the policy will infringe on their rights, but that they feel e-mail is a good way to communicate to the campus and it is now being taken away from them," said Cusick. "They won't directly have that benefit anymore."
Junior Linda Padilla feels that she has the right to have access to class lists.
"I feel that I have a right to e-mail my colleagues and that everyone should be able to handle the e-mails in a mature way," Padilla said. "If a student is constantly abusing the system, then that is when they should lose their class-lists access."
Other students feel strongly that Information Technology should monitor the list serves.
"I think Informational Technology should monitor the e-mails. They know that people are going to abuse it," said senior Colleen Weigel.
Often inboxes are so cluttered with mass e-mails that students do not know which are important to read.
"I think it's getting out of control," junior Jena Morreale said. "I like the fact that some people have subject headings, though. Then it is easier to know which are mass e-mails and which are important e-mails."
"It's hard to find the important e-mails when your inbox is cluttered with football ticket e-mails. It's better just to put up signs so people can contact you — you don't have to infringe on them," said freshman Stephanie Grammens.
"I think there should be some sort of screening process because it takes up too much time to go through 50 messages and you sometimes miss the important ones," said senior Jessica Hickey.
As well as list serves, a "black message board" is currently being set up on the Saint Mary's web page for students to be able to put up messages about tickets, lost or found items, or anything else that might be of interest to the students body.
"This will be a good tool for Saint Mary's College to use. It will pick up the slack on ticket sales, news and current events," said Cusick. "Students can pull the information they want."
These changes take time, though.
"At first there might be a lot of resistance to have a blackboard," said senior Drusilla Mowl. "It just takes time with technology to get used to."
Cusick feels confident about the new policy. Now that BOG. has endorsed it, they will pass it on to Dr. Linda Timm, vice president for Student Affairs.
"[BOG] would like to see it implemented," said Cusick. "After it is reviewed it will be passed on to Informational Technology's and they will take the necessary steps that the students want."
BOG wanted to make sure this policy reflected what the students wanted.
"[We] really wanted the proposal to come from the students," said Nagle.
Contact Nellie Williams at
will6176@saintmarys.edu
All News Stories for Thursday, November 8, 2001
